My radiology colleague from Harvard and I wrote a chapter on how women are being treated differently around the country and the world based on their core needle biopsy diagnosis. I posted the abstract a while back, but now we can publish the manuscript we wrote which is available here as a Word document: High [...]
Our book chapter on how women are treated disparately following a core needle breast biopsy of a “high risk” lesion has now been published in the current issue of Radiologic Clinics of North America. My colleague from Harvard Medical School and I want women to know that the current data in the breast cancer literature [...]
There is a recent study published in the September 23 issue of Breast Cancer Research that looked at changes in prognostic markers (estrogen/progesterone receptor and HER2/neu) between primary breast cancers and metastatic lesions. If you click on the Breast Cancer Research link it will provide you with the abstract. The full article is temporarily free from [...]
If you haven’t seen this recent article from the New York Times it’s worth a read.
I have posted before about the importance of getting your breast biopsy diagnosed from a pathologist who specializes in breast pathology. This article points out how subtle the distinction can be between atypical ductal hyperplasia and low grade ductal carcinoma [...]
I wrote an article a while back called “What Your Core Needle Biopsy Diagnosis Means” to help patients understand why sometimes even a “benign” diagnosis may require a surgical excision. While writing that article, I spoke to many of my colleagues in breast pathology and breast imaging and found out that there is a marked [...]
In the current issue of Cancer (April 1), there is a an interesting news article summarizing the findings of the 3rd International Consensus Conference on Image-Detected Breast Cancer. The expert panel suggests that in up to 35% of cases, patients are undergoing unnecessary open surgical biopsies as a first diagnostic procedure when core needle biopsy [...]
In the online “early view” section of the journal Cancer there is a new research article proposing that using three currently-used immunohistochemical breast markers in a group of patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy, doctors can sub-type cancers similar to those described by molecular profiling. They also suggest these sub-types are associated with different responses to treatment and overall survival. [...]
There is controversy in the breast health care community about using the term “carcinoma” for a non-invasive tumor (DCIS or LCIS). I want to share with you the abstract from the NIH State-of-the-Science Conference Statement on Ductal Carcinoma in Situ which was just published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. There is a [...]
The newest edition of the AJCC’s Staging Manual is out and there are some changes to breast cancer staging which took effect January 1, 2010. Several updates in the new edition I felt were good include:
- Moving T0/T1 tumors with only micrometases in the axillary nodes to stage IB from the IIA category.
- Re-affirming the [...]
This past October I was at the XXVII Brazilian Society of Pathology meeting in Buzios, Brazil where I was invited to give a few lectures on breast pathology. I gave one lecture on the traditional grading of breast cancer vs. the new molecular tests that are available. The audience response made me think more on [...]